Australian Linguistics – Page 10 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Blog catcher: Africa, America, Australia, art, language, literacy, software, travel

5 February 201127 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Sociolingo’s Africa is a general blog which includes posts about languages (the writer’s based in Mali but draws together material from across Africa). There are some interesting posts on linguistics, literacy – including mother tongue language education. So much seems so familiar. Thanks to this blog I’ve learned about Litcam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for … Read more

Ngapartji-Ngapartji online course in Pitjantjatjara

5 February 201119 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

It’s been very hard for ordinary city-dwelling Australians (i.e. most of us) to learn Indigenous Australian languages. Most universities don’t teach them, and getting to Alice Springs for courses at the Institute for Aboriginal Development is out of most people’s reach. Summer schools, such as the Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay ones mentioned in a previous post are rare. So it had to come, and it has, but in a rather unusual way. The first public online course in an Australian Indigenous language is run out of a demountable building in Alice Springs by the Ngapartji Ngapartji group. Trevor Jamieson and his family want to tell the story of how they, some of the Spinifex people, were forced to leave their lands during the missile testing in the 1950s and 1960s. They do this at arts festivals, using Pitjantjatjara, English, songs and dance. And they run an on-line language program, so that future audiences can understand the Pitjantjatjara talk in their performances.

Sand talk – and how to record it

5 February 201116 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

In Central Australia, you often see Aboriginal people sitting on the ground, talking, and simultaneously drawing on the sand, smoothing it over when they’ve finished a point, and starting again. They might be recounting places along a journey, listing family members, drawing maps, or describing the movement of characters in a story. I’ll call this ‘sand talk’.

Endangered languages, cultures and the Australian Research Council lottery

5 February 201111 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

The Australian Research Council’s website today has survived the pressure of everyone wanting to know whether they’ve got winning tickets. I was in a few syndicates (PARADISEC, continuing the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition (ACLA project), and a new project on Indonesian). And the lucky winners are…

Indigenous language teaching and tasting

5 February 201111 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

There’ve been two recent stories in the media about Indigenous language education – one on teaching Yuwaalaraay, the language of the Walgett area of NSW to local children, and the other on teaching the Western Australian language Bunuba in a private school in Melbourne. One’s about language revival, and the other’s about language tasting.

Ethics and the researcher

5 February 20119 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Behaving in a good way to the people one is working with is vital – unethical researchers do damage to communities in the short-term. And they do incalculable longterm damage, because communities that feel burned by researchers will reject other research proposals which might benefit them. There’s a new publication addressed to Indigenous people on how to deal with health researchers. It’s a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) booklet Keeping research on track: a guide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples about health research ethics. In the past, the NHMRC guidelines for working with Indigenous people have been taken as models in other disciplines. And so it’s important for us to look at them, even though linguists don’t go sticking needles into people, and a grammar is of less direct benefit than the results of a study of the causes of kidney failure.

Mother tongue education: the right to understand what the teacher says

5 February 20116 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Pitjantjatjara people in South Australia are thinking of abandoning their experiment with monolingual English education after fifteen years. At the same time, some communities in the Northern Territory are suffering from dysfunctional schools which happen to be bilingual, and so are thinking of abandoning their bilingual education programs, and the attendant teaching positions for community members. Churn churn. It’s not about whether the program teaches English literacy and numeracy only. It’s about children understanding what is happening in the classroom, and it’s about communities understanding language shift. The evidence is that dropping bilingual education is no magic silver bullet for a miraculous improvement in children’s English language and literacy.
But there’s more evidence that bilingual education can produce better results than monolingual education. In The Australian Anthropological Society Newsletter Number 103, September 2006 (thanks David!) is an article by Ute Eickelkamp On a Positive Note: The Anangu Education Service Conference. Ute describes a conference held in Alice Springs in which half of the more than 200 delegates were Anangu staff and tertiary students “and many discussions and workshops were held in Pitjantjatjara”. Yes!

Tin trunks, gender, wax and emotion

5 February 20112 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Every dead ethnographer (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) had a tin trunk in which all the information on the people, the language, the culture, anything, yes anything you want to know, could be found. But, I’m sorry, aunty died last week, and we don’t know WHERE that tin trunk is now. (Source of observation: Michael Walsh). The anthropologist Ursula McConnel who worked with Wik Mungkan people on Cape York Peninsula, died in 1957, and people have been looking for her trunk ever since.

Summer school courses in Australian Indigenous languages

5 February 201130 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Want to learn some Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay in Sydney this January? John Giacon passes on this information. Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative and Many Rivers Aboriginal Language Centre, in association with the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney, are facilitating Ngaawa-Garay, a summer school which will offer one week courses in Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay from Monday 15 – Friday 19 January, 2007.

Congratulations

5 February 201129 September 2006 by admin

Running a bit late on this post, but, congratulations to Stan Grant Senior on being awarded the 2006 Deadly for “Outstanding Acheivement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education”, for his work on Wiradjuri language revival. And of course, congratulations too to all the other recipients!